About two dozen men and women in their seventies and eighties, all welling with emotion, ascended the stage one after the other. Some struggled to walk and were assisted by young family members. These were the Alitalia employees who once worked at the airline’s Tripoli office in Libya, and their families.

At the ceremony, which was sponsored by the Association of Libyan Jews in Italy and held a month ago at a hotel in Rome’s Villa Borghese park, they were each given certificates of appreciation for having saved 2,500 imperiled Jews during the pogrom and riots in Libya during the Six-Day War – 55 years ago this week.